More than a century after an eccentric scholar made an infamous deal with a devil, the story of Faust has passed into legend. However, the true Faust is not the stuffy, professorial man known in fairy tales, but a charismatic, bespectacled woman named Johanna Faust, who happens to still be alive. Searching for pieces of her long-lost demon, Johanna passes through a provincial town, where she saves a young boy named Marion from a criminal's fate. In exchange, she asks a simple favor of Marion, but Marion soon finds himself intrigued by the peculiar Doctor Faust and joins her on her journey. Thus begins the strange and wonderful adventures of Frau Faust!
If you don't think he's cute in his shadow demon form, you don't deserve him in his face-he-copied-from-a-priest-he-knows form 😤
EDIT: Post Cancelled everyone go look up the authors first Manga "Futari no Renai Shoka". Ngl fam thats some creepy shit. Really recontextualises Mahou and sadly Elias too for me 🙃 bye
EDIT 2 BECAUSE MAYBE I WASNT CLEAR ENOUGH: the authors first manga was about a 20yo or so woman immediately proposing to a 15 year old boy (oh look the same age as Chise! And even the same set up!) And THEY GET TOGETHER AT THE END.
To reiterate, a romance series between a child who just entered high school and a ADULT WITH A JOB
Can't stop anyone from liking that crap. But if your defense is 'oh its not really romantic' or 'oh Elias is just a child too' hahaha fuck that. That excuse does not fly when the author has done this multiple times.
Personally it makes me fucking sick, which I hate because i've loved this story for years and made so many excuses for it. But holy fucking shit coming back to it as an adult. So much is creepy. Nothing was stopping Yamazaki from writing Chise as 18-20. it would not have effected the story.
tldr: Kore Yamazaki has written multiple stories about a child being romantically involved with an adult and thats fucked!!
Recalling this beautiful thing Kore Yamazaki said and I think, for everyone who loves stories, it could save us a lot of discourses and enrich our experience with stories if we take it:
Authors told everything they want to tell within their story to the best of their ability, but when we experience the story, that experience is our own, and thus it's valuable in its own right. What we get from the story is our own, how we feel about it is our own, because it's true to us, even though it's not the absolute truth—because stories are never meant to be an 'absolute truth' in the first place; it's up to the author to convey their perspective, but how it's taken is up to the audience.
Storytelling is communication—and like any other methods of communications, there's always a possibility of the message conveyed being interpreted differently from what's intended. But as the one conveying the message, that shouldn't deter us from telling our story or attempting to communicate regardless, and as the one receiving the message, even getting the 'wrong' message could also be valuable sometimes.
Kore Yamazaki is such a genius of ambiguity that someone could interpret her work as an exploration of an aro/ace relationship or as a panoply of fetish tropes including but not limited to forced marriage, vore, and tentacle porn and everyone is correct and no one actually knows the true intention behind any of it.